Tag Archives: firefox

Mozilla planned things differently this year. All of Mozilla including the Mozilla Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation started back in late October and had the 2015 goals 90% finished in early December. As the humorous but insightful cliché goes, “the last 10% is the hardest 90%” which is why the goals weren’t really 100% done until after the Christmas break.

We started with a three year vision and then moved onto the goals.

Behold – here is the User Success three year vision:

We will push the boundaries of what it means to give global community-powered support for a billion users with excellence and personality. We will enable users to help themselves and each other in ways never before seen.

We will surface the issues that product teams need to fix first to stop attrition, because we understand that the best service is no service. As a result, user satisfaction is skyrocketing.

Internally, we will become known as the team that truly understands our growing user base. Externally, we will become seen as thought-leaders in proactive customer care.

Let’s get a little more specific and talk about our specific plans for 2015. First, some assumptions we’re working under:

The size of the paid staff on my team will remain largely the same (give or take a couple of hundred people – one can always dream)

Our fantastic volunteer community continues to grow and thrive, aided by our focused community management efforts

With that out of the way, these are the specific things we’re doing in 2015:

1. Help make our products better to increase user happiness

Increase the accuracy of user insights provided to the org so that product and engineering teams can more easily act on them.

Get instrumentation in place to define and prioritize Top Attrition Risk issues (issues that are most devastating to user happiness and retention, such as data loss).

2. Help more users by moving our efforts up in the product/user lifecycle

Self-heal: Don’t wait for users to come to us with problems – when possible, fix known issues automatically in Desktop Firefox!

3. Provide excellent support to all of our products and services

Increase user satisfaction across our products and services.

Create feedback mechanisms and stand up support to serve and gain insights about users of new product and service launches.

On “moving our efforts up” in the product/user lifecycle, one analogy I’ve been kicking around in the past is the idea of our team on a football field (note that this comes from someone who isn’t very interested in football!).

Remember the amazing collection of circles-in-circles in part 1 of this blog post series? Now, consider those circles overlaid on a football field.

Maybe this helps illustrate how we think of the impact we have on both our products and our users. The higher up in the field we’re able to deflect issues, the lower the cost and the higher the user satisfaction.

One way of looking at this is to consider the point when a user hits a support website as a point of failure. If the midfield messes up, defense has to deal with it. And if the defense messes up, it’s up to the goalie to recover the situation. The closer you get to the goal, the more costly mistakes become and the less proactive you can be on the field.

To football fans out there, on a scale of 1 to 10, how painfully obvious is it that I know more about user happiness than the green field of chess?

Next up: User Success in 2015 – Part 3: How will we know we nailed it in 2015? (Will update this post with a link once that post is published.)

Ever loved a piece of software so much that you learned everything you could about it and helped others with it?

Ever coordinated an online community? Especially one around supporting users?

Ever measured and tweaked a website’s content so that more folks could find it and learn from it?

Got 2 out of 3 of the above?

Then work with me (since Firefox works closely with my area: Firefox for Android and in the future iOS via cloud services like Sync) and the rest of my colleagues on the fab Mozilla User Success team (especially my fantastic Firefox savvy colleagues over at User Advocacy).

And super extra bonus: you’ll also work with our fantastic community like all Mozilla employees AND Firefox product management, marketing and engineering.

Take a brief detour and head over to Roland’s blog to get a sense of one of the awesome people you’d get to work closely with in this exciting role (trust me, you’ll want to work with Roland!). After that, I hope you know what to do! :)

Once again, happy belated 2015 – this time wearing a slightly different but equally awesome hat! In this series of blog posts, I’m going to set the stage for User Success in 2015 and beyond. Let’s start with a couple of quick clarifications:

SUMO = support.mozilla.org

SUMO != User Success

SUMO has come to mean a number of things over the years: a team, a support website, an underlying web platform, and/or a vibrant community. Within the team, we think of SUMO as the online support website itself, support.mozilla.org, including its contents. And then the amazing community of both volunteers and paid staff helping our users is simply called the SUMO community. But we don’t refer to SUMO as the name of a team, because what we do together goes beyond SUMO.

Crucially, SUMO is a subset of User Success, which consists of a number of teams and initiatives with a shared mission to make our users more successful with our products. User Success is not just our fabulous website which millions of users and many, many volunteers help out with. User Success is both proactive and reactive, as illustrated in this hilariously exciting collection of circles in circles:

Our job starts as soon as somebody starts using one of our products (Firefox, Firefox for Android, Firefox OS and more). Sometimes a user has an issue and goes to our website to look for a solution. Our job is then to make sure that user leaves our website with an answer to their question. But our job doesn’t stop there – we also need to make sure that engineers and product leads are aware of the top issues so they can solve the root cause of the issue in the product itself, leading to many more satisfied users.

Other times a user might just want to leave some feedback about their experience on input.mozilla.org. Our job is then to make sure that this feedback is delivered to our product and engineering teams in an aggregated and actionable way that enables them to make the right priorities about what goes into the future versions of the product.

The proactive side of User Success consists of:

User Advocacy – A team looking at all our user interaction points, from support, social media, telemetry and other data to better understand what our users need so we can then help engineering with getting bugs fixed, eliminating the need for reactive support for these issues in the future.

Education – This includes things like our in-product information, tutorials, how-to’s, and other Engagement content we collaborate with other teams to create).

Self Service – This includes our vast knowledge base of solutions to common problems users experience when using our products.

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I honestly believe Mozilla is committed to freedom and privacy on the web. Google is committed to making money and knowing everything I do. Firefox greets me with a page explaining my rights as a user of open source software. Chrome greets me with… sigh… Chrome greets me with a fucking advertisement for a Chromebook.

If you’re running Windows, Mac, Linux and haven’t used Firefox for a while, it’s time to switch back. And if you have an Android-powered phone, you definitely should check out the best mobile browser, bar none: Firefox for Android.

Ten years ago the web was broken, but Mozilla fixed it with Firefox. Today, the mobile web is just as broken — and Mozilla will fix it again with Firefox OS. Read on to learn how.

Monopolies are bad for customers

A common sight in 2003.

Not everyone has been around long enough to remember it, but the web used to be dominated by a single company that dictated most of its terms. Ten years ago, most dynamic websites were built using ActiveX, a technology developed by Microsoft that only worked in Internet Explorer on Windows due to its close ties with the underlying APIs of the operating system. For customers, this meant that in order to use the (then) modern web, you had to use Internet Explorer 6 — and you had to use Windows. Over time, other technologies like Flash and Shockwave eventually replaced the role of ActiveX, and this opened up interoperability across platforms a little bit since those technologies worked on Mac OS as well, but minority OSes like Linux were still in the dark with either non-existent or obsolete versions of these proprietary technologies.

At Mozilla, we saw these problems and understood the importance of cross-platform interoperability and standards on the web. Standards are good for customers, developers, and the whole industry because they promote freedom, choice, and innovation. In Mozilla’s eyes, having one for-profit company continuing to dictate the terms of the web would lead to a very dark future. So we created Firefox.

Mozilla fixed the desktop web with Firefox

Few people believed back in 2003 that an open source web browser built by a tiny non-profit would stand a chance to beat a giant like Microsoft at its own game. The odds were certainly against us — Microsoft’s combined market share exceeded 95% the year before Firefox 1.0 shipped. But we all know the history that followed: Firefox quickly disrupted the monopoly and introduced a kick-ass web browser that focused on users’ needs by creating a truly delightful browsing experience — and more importantly, one that actually followed web standards. This had enormous effects on the web: suddenly developers started to innovate again and created new experiences that no one had seen before (pre-Firefox, innovation on the web was basically limited to figuring out new ways to annoy users with pop-ups and scrolling marquees).

As a result of our success with Firefox, Microsoft woke up from its self-declared hibernation of IE6 and decided to pick up the development of their browser again to catch up on some of the new web standards that developers were now using extensively thanks to Firefox. This pushed the innovation forward even faster because the lowest common denominator on the web (IE) slowly became a browser largely following the latest web standards. It also made it possible for other players to enter the web browsing market. And this is what makes the web as cross-platform compatible as it is today. It’s still not perfect, but the difference since 2003 is dramatic.

Let’s be clear about this: the reason why you can buy just about any desktop computer or mobile device today and expect websites to work without hick-ups is because Mozilla created Firefox! We take this interoperable web mostly for granted today, but it’s important to remember that just ten years ago, this was a utopia.

Web sites → Apps

Fast forward to today and the landscape and definition of the web has changed. The web is turning mobile and people increasingly use phones, tablets and other mobile devices to get online. But it’s not just the usage of the web that has changed — the web itself is different too. The most notable change is that the majority of the time spent online using mobile devices is happening in native web apps developed specifically for the platform of that particular handset — not on actual web sites viewed through a traditional web browser. For example, instead of going directly to http://www.twitter.com, people download the Twitter app for their phone. In other words, native apps are increasingly becoming the lens through which the web is viewed these days. Why is this? The short answer is historical reasons.

The slightly longer answer: Native apps were faster and more capable than web technologies when smart phones started to become mainstream a few years ago. The web itself didn’t have capabilities like offline storage or technologies optimized to create snappy and app-like user interfaces. Web standards also lacked direct hooks to crucial hardware like the camera and other important parts of the device. (It’s relevant to point out that today’s web technologies do have all of these app-like capabilities; more on that later.)

Duopolies are just as bad

If you consider the issues ten years ago with web sites that only worked on certain platforms, you begin to see the connection with today’s mobile web apps that only work on certain mobile platforms. Today’s situation isn’t any better than the monopoly we were facing on the desktop before Firefox came along.

For customers, these isolated vertical silos mean limited choice and freedom, because you can’t easily switch from one platform to the other without a lot of headache and changed workflows. For example, if you’re used to the iPhone and have purchased a bunch of apps for it, you will basically have to start from scratch if you decide to switch to an Android-powered phone. There might be some overlap, but there will no doubt be a handful of apps that you simply won’t be able to use anymore. And you’ll most likely have to pay for many apps again. This sucks. It’s a bit like not being able to access certain websites just because you switched to a different operating system. Déjà vu anyone?

Example of how the apps world is scattered and incompatible today.

For developers, the situation is a nightmare, since you have to almost double the development resources to reach most of your customers. And with Tizen and Windows Phone and other mobile OSes lined up and eager to get their own share of this old vertical silo landscape, it’s easy to see how this way of doing business on the mobile web isn’t financially viable for anyone but the largest app development houses. Who wants to develop an app five times?

And customers will of course continue to suffer just as much in this scattered model (“when is Spotify coming to Windows Phone?” and “Why doesn’t Instagram have the same art filters on Android and iOS?”).

Mozilla will fix the mobile web with Firefox OS

Enter Firefox OS. The whole idea with Firefox OS is to make the web itself the platform not just for traditional web sites, but for apps as well. Apps are the new lens through which the web is mostly used on mobile devices today — and the new, modern html5-based web is more than ready to power it.

Crucially, Mozilla isn’t trying to create its own new silo — the goal is to demonstrate that the web itself is capable of powering apps on all platforms, and to bring web platform interoperability to the mobile apps world. This will disrupt the whole industry for the benefit of both customers and developers, and it will bring the same benefits to the mobile web that Firefox brought to the desktop web: freedom, choice, and innovation. Case in point: today you can choose between many modern browsers on the desktop: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and IE — and you don’t have to worry about whether your favorite web sites will work or not. Firefox made that possible. And that’s exactly the future we are building for the mobile web with Firefox OS!

What does this mean for developers? Imagine writing an app once and immediately having it running on all major and minor mobile platforms. If you write your app using web standards like html5, that’s a possibility. The cost savings will be enormous.

What does it mean for customers? Imagine a world where you truly own the apps you’ve purchased and where you have the freedom to choose any mobile platform and even switch between them over time — and take all your apps with you wherever you go. You might start with an Android device in 2012, then switch to a Firefox OS device in 2013, and perhaps you want to try iPhone 7 in 2015 (only to dump it in favor of Firefox OS again in 2016). Regardless of your choice, your apps will follow along with you and work just as well on all of these devices. Sounds like utopia? Déjà vu anyone?

This is why I’m so excited about what Mozilla is doing right now to disrupt the web and open it up once more. We did the impossible ten years ago, and we’re ready to do it again.

If you read all previous posts, you probably noticed a few overarching themes throughout the series: Mobilization, Advocacy, andScale.

Mobilization

With mobilization, I mean it in a non-traditional sense of the word: the web is becoming increasingly mobile, and this shift changes our efforts to support our users. We need to become mobile — we need to mobilize!

The Swedish term for a portable music player was — freestyle!

I’m extremely excited about our plans to create a mobile support experience that no one has built before. Mozilla Support is already insanely cool to use from your mobile phone, but just imagine how awesome it will be once we hook it into your phone’s notification system and utilize some of the new web APIs we’ve worked on as part of making the web itself the app platform for Firefox OS (and, long-term, for apps across all major mobile platforms). With the direction the web itself is taking through efforts like Firefox OS, the opportunities to create awesome experiences are only limited by your imagination.

The closest comparison to what is happening with the web today that I can think of is the introduction of the Sony Walkman in 1979, which revolutionized the way people listened to music. SUMO is heading in the same direction and this will bring lots of new opportunities to help fellow Firefox users no matter where you are — and the karma this will give you will feel more rewarding than listening to your favorite mixtape!

Advocacy

Over the years, we’ve gotten better and better at distilling user feedback from our support channels and reporting it to engineering and QA so they can prioritize their work on fixing the most annoying bugs our users complain about. Cheng played a huge role in kickstarting our efforts already back in 2008, and today we have a dedicated team responsible for this work. In 2013, we’ll institutionalize User Advocacy and partner even more closely with Product Management, UX, Engineering and QA to deliver on Mozilla’s brand promise: Firefox answers to no one but you.

We’ve already built in hooks to Input in Firefox OS so we can ensure high quality user sentiment and feedback reporting for the first handsets once we launch. Of course, our user advocacy efforts will go beyond our internal feedback tools — we’ll also be monitoring press, blogs, forums and social media throughout the product launch to make sure we aren’t missing anything. Our goal here is the same with Firefox OS as it’s been for desktop and Android Firefox: to proactively support our users by making our products better.

Scale

This is the glue that will tie it all together — at the end of 2013, our hope is that we’ll be able to look back at a year with significant community growth and where contributions went from just something you could do in front of your computer to something you could do anywhere you are as long as you have your phone with you.

SUMO staff, summer 2012.

We have awesome people in the SUMO community already — people like Alice, feer56, Scoobi, cor-el, Satdav, madperson, iamjayakumars, jscher2000, Tobbi, underpass, Swarnawa, smo, Nukeador, michro, and many many more (this is really just a sample of our incredibly passionate community!). At the end of 2013, I hope that these people will have taken even more ownership in their various areas of our support efforts — and I hope I’ll be able to list even crazier and impossible to pronounce forum nicknames for new people who joined our community this year!

As part of our quest to grow our community, we need to challenge our assumptions and traditions and be open to completely new processes and community governance models to scale our work to Mozilla’s growing product line. I’m envisioning a community where hundreds of people around the world help with everything from writing support articles that are read by tens of thousands of users, to helping users directly where our users are — the forum, social media, and in person. While I’m incredibly proud of the community we’ve been able to build so far around SUMO, I know we can do more.